Jury urged to give verdict of not guilty by insanity
The jury of nine women and three men hearing the trial of Lynn Gibbs, aged 47, who is charged with the murder of her daughter Ciara Gibbs, aged 16, between 11pm, November 25, 2006 and 10am, November 26, 2006, is expected toretire this morning to consider their verdict.
The psychiatrist from Killure in Gowran, Co Kilkenny, has pleaded not guilty to murdering her daughter but admits her killing. The jury are being urged to return a verdict of not guilty by insanity.
The harrowing details of the lead-up to Ciara’s murder and Gibbs’ family and mental history were put before the Central Criminal Court in Dublin yesterday with consultant psychiatrists agreeing she should be kept in secure psychiatric care and not be held responsible for Ciara’s killing.
Through tears, Ciara’s father Gerard Gibbs told the court how he and his wife were trying to get their daughter help for her undiagnosed eating disorder at the time. Ciara resented being referred to a psychiatrist, telling her mother “I hate you” during one argument but otherwise they had an excellent relationship.
In hindsight, the discovery of Ciara’s eating problems had resulted in a massive change in his wife, he said.
He last saw his wife and Ciara on the morning of November 25, 2006 when they left for University College Dublin where Ciara was attending a lecture for students who excelled in maths.
Mr Gibbs took his 13-year-old son Gearóid to Ballypatrick, Co Tipperary, to visit his mother. He cut some firewood for his mother and took her to Mass and then stayed the night.
Mr Gibbs and his son returned at 9.38am the next morning to find the front gates to the home locked. Inside, in the upstairs bedroom, he found his daughter lying motionless on the en-suite floor, the bath full of water and a bloody meat-clever on a shelf.
He picked up Ciara’s cold wet body and put her on the bed before noticing his wife unconscious on the bedroom floor. He put her on the bed beside her daughter, slapping both their faces to try and revive them before dialling 999.
Gibbs was taken to St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny but was later transferred to St Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin and is now a secure patient at the Central Mental Hospital. She had three weeks of electronic convulsive treatment and could not be interviewed by gardaí until December 23.
The court was read two interviews conducted by gardaí but Gibbs remembered little of the night. “I would have run a bath and I remember calling Ciara. She came into my bedroom and the bathroom. I recall pushing her under the water but I can’t recall the steps in between or what I said,” she told gardaí. “I remember being very low. I believed there was no hope for Ciara or myself, I planned that we both die.”
Dr Gobnait Carney, who was seeing Ciara about her weight loss, said the 16-year-old had a body mass index of 17 where the normal was 19 to 24. Initially she put on weight but then dropped it again, but no one was pointing to the gloomy, catastrophic outlook that was in Gibbs’s mind.
Professor Tom Fahey a consultant psychiatrist from London told the court he believed Gibbs was suffering a major depressive disorder at the time.
“Lynn Gibbs felt that her daughter was in a state of severe suffering that wasn’t going to get any better, it was going to persist and she felt through a type of distorted reasoning that came through her illness that she should act to relieve her daughter of her suffering and take her own life at the same time.”
While Gibbs knew the nature and quality of her act she did not know what she was doing was wrong and in fact thought it was right and could not refrain from doing it, he said. The best way forward was for her to remain in the Central Mental Hospital, he said.
His comments were echoed by Dr Cleo Van Velsen who was also asked to assess Dr Gibbs before the trial. “I don’t think we’ll ever fully know what it was that caused the crisis that night,” she said.
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